Riga Stradiņš University (RSU) is the first Latvian university to join the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Association. At the same time, the Shared Services Centre for Higher Education and Science Information Technology, of which RSU is a founding member, was admitted to the Association as a Latvian mandate organization.

The EOSC Association was founded in 2020 with the aim of bringing together e-infrastructures, digital service providers, projects and research institutions to implement a common European research data infrastructure. The Association is a platform for finding new partners, developing collaborations with data-intensive research infrastructures and learning about new international projects. The Association currently counts 168 members and 81 observers.

The Association’s services include providing access to research data repositories, software solutions and training events. It will allow large-scale research, simulation and other activities to be carried out using available data and software resources, based on common standards.

“Membership of the EOSC Association will open up more opportunities for international research collaboration and provide RSU with the possibility to influence various processes related to the development of a common research data infrastructure and collaboration with other initiatives. These include European-level research infrastructures or the European health data space. RSU will be able to collaborate and represent its views together with other Latvian, Baltic and Nordic institutions,” says Liene Ņikitina-Zaķe, Director of the RSU Science Department.

RSU has already started other activities related to the EOSC. For example, Dataverse – RSU’s institutional research data repository – was registered on the EOSC portal as a trusted and validated source of research data, which will help to integrate RSU research data into the international information flow and make more efficient use of other services. The Horizon Europe calls for proposals have strict conditions in the context of open science and accessibility of research data, so EOSC membership will facilitate RSU’s involvement in these projects.

Source: Labs of Latvia